Will People Stop Having Sex to Get Pregnant? It Might Just Happen

Baby-making sex may start out fun but if conception doesn’t happen within the first few months, it can begin to feel like a chore full of charts, thermometers and mucus instead of flowers, massage oil and soft music. But would you give it up completely if it meant a better chance of having a healthy baby that grew up free of diseases and development issues? One law and genetics expert thinks we will in the not-so-distant future.

Hank Greely, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, believes people in the United States are only decades away from making most babies in a lab instead of a bed. His idea is that parents will start by having numerous embryos created — say 100 — and then scientists will screen the embryos for abnormalities, pre-disposition to genetic diseases like breast cancer or Alzheimer’s, sex and other traits.

What the Science Says

None of this is entirely new — Louise Brown, the first baby born from an embryo created in a lab, is now 39 years old and a mother herself. Screening embryos through a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is already used by some parents going through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Women who’ve had trouble carrying a pregnancy to term may have their embryos screened for genetic abnormalities. And carriers of genes for diseases like Huntington’s can now screen embryos to ensure that they haven’t passed the gene down.

Anyone who has been through IVF knows that it takes a lot of work to create just a few embryos. Harvesting eggs is difficult, painful and takes at least a month of injections and blood tests to make sure that there are enough mature eggs to make the retrieval procedure worthwhile. This expensive and arduous process does not yield nearly the number of eggs that would be needed for Greely’s 100-embryo vision.

He believes that science will soon be able to make egg and sperm cells from parents’ skin cells or other somatic cells (which literally means every cell other than sperm or ova). This is not only easier than egg harvesting, it would also allow people who were never (or no longer are) producing sperm or eggs to be fertile. According to Greely, it would even be possible for cells from a male to become eggs and vice-versa — which would allow same-sex couples to conceive.

Greely argues that screenings in the future will be much more in-depth than anything we do now. He envisions parents-to-be screening for eye color, hair color, facial features and other less tangible traits like intelligence or athletic prowess, though he doesn’t think it will rise to the level of creating designer babies, like the world of genetic elitism you see in movies (like the Ethan Hawke film, Gattica). As he recently explained: "I don’t think we’re going to be able to say this embryo will get a 1550 on its two-part SAT. But, this embryo has a 60 percent chance of being in the top half, this embryo has a 13 percent chance of being in the top 10 percent — I think that’s really possible." More importantly, he points out, we’re still starting with DNA from two people and there are only so many possibilities that can come out of that.

Technology Might Change the Way We Have Kids — But Is That a Good Thing?

Of course, even the idea of this process brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions. If you’re told that one embryo has a slight chance of mental illness but a near 100 percent chance of being very intelligent, do you choose that over one that has less possibility of intelligence but no known risk of diseases? What if you choose an embryo that you believe to be predisposed for musical greatness and he or she turns out to be tone-deaf — would you be more disappointed than you would have been under today’s imprecise, luck-of-the-draw baby-making techniques? Does that disappointment impact your parenting and make your child feel like he could never live up your expectation? And, what if you and your partner don’t agree on which embryo is "best?" Does one person always feel a little cheated, even after the baby is born?

Rosamond Rhodes, director of bioethics at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, thinks that these kinds of questions would make the process unappealing for parents. Rhodes, whose biggest complaint about Greely’s vision is that it still lives in the realm of science fiction, points out that many traits have trade-offs and we don’t always know what they are. A courageous child, for example, might be more inclined to get into situation that could get her killed one day. Or we could choose a trait that seems important today but becomes irrelevant as the child ages. Take HIV: We are already able to tell whether someone is more or less resistant to HIV, but in 20 years that trait might be irrelevant if science finds a way to eliminate HIV. Should parents take this into account when they give each embryo a grade?

Many parents will probably find the idea of deciding between traits and what-ifs to be "psychologically and socially abhorrent," Rhodes says.

There's also the issue of inequality. Even Greely acknowledges that this method of making a baby is far more expensive than inserting Tab A into Slot B. If it were only available to those who could afford it, then wealthy families would be able to pass down not just financial resources, but some genetic advantages that might someday come with being able to choose the best embryo — like a greater chance for high intelligence or a likelihood of athletic ability, which would further exacerbate existing socioeconomic divides.

Greely doesn’t worry about this, arguing that he believes this type of assisted reproduction will be subsidized by a health care system that realizes it’s cheaper to screen embryos than care for babies born with serious diseases. Ultimately, he thinks everyone would have access to the technology, regardless of wealth.

Rhodes agrees that in a hypothetical world — in which this technology exits and there is universal health care to cover it — the inequality issue might not be a problem, but she stresses how far we are from any of this. "We can’t tell yet if a person would develop diabetes," she said as an example. "Genetics are very complicated and we are a long way away from being able to say this genetic marker causes this trait." Over the years she has seen a lot of technologies hyped as the next big thing — like the idea that xenotransplantation was going to lead to a world in which animals grew organs for humans — lose steam. Pieces of that technology exist, but we have yet to see heart and lung farms sprouting up across the country.

Basically: Most "unreasonable and unfeasible" advances have simply not materialized. And this one, she says, is particularly unlikely, because — let's be honest — sex is fun! It's unlikely that people are going to want to give it up completely. Her bottom line: "For anyone who is reproducing right now or thinking of getting into the business of reproducing, this is irrelevant."

RELATED STORIES

Martha Kempner is a writer, sexual health expert, and co-author of the book 50 Great Myths in Human Sexuality. She writes about sexual behavior, contraception, STDs and her efforts to raise sexually healthy girls in a sexually unhealthy world. Her articles explain new research, provide commentary on current events, analyze social trends and bust myths. Martha has a masters degree in human sexuality from NYU. She lives with her husband, two young(ish) daughters and a poodle.